Man charged with ‘terroristic threatening’ over Halloween body bag display

A man has been arrested over a Halloween display in his garden.

Stephan Marcum, 58, has been charged with ‘terroristic threatening’ over the display which featured body bags labeled with the titles of local government officials.

The bags, one of which was hanging from a noose, included labels around their ‘necks’ featuring titles such as ‘district judge’ and ‘mayor’.

A local prosecutor reported the display to police after driving past Marcum’s home on Court Street in Stanton, Kentucky.

Powell County Judge Executive Eddie Barnes drove past the display himself and was left unsettled despite not being named on any of the body bags.

He said he had known Marcum for ‘decades’, describing as someone who ‘can be a good person’ – but the judge said he completely disagreed with how he’d chosen to express himself.

Judge Barnes told WKYT: ‘This is something you just don’t see every day.

‘At first I didn’t know what to think about it because I actually drove by and saw it in his yard and thought, wow, that’s kinda harsh.’

After Marcum’s arrest the decorations were seized and taken to a police station as evidence.

He is being held at the Powell County Detention Center on a $5,000 bond.

This isn’t the first time someone’s Halloween decorations landed them in hot water.

Last year, in Liverpool, a mum was told by a council officer to take down her ‘body bag’ decoration hanging from a tree after a neighbour complained.

In 2022, a woman’s body bag and coffin decorations were called ‘in bad taste’ because her home was a mile away from the scene of three murders which took place 50 years before.

And in 2020 an artist made decorated his garden in such a gory fashion back in 2020 that neighbours called the police.

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